Heat brings a beat for a city to shine

Date: January 3 2013

Steve Dow

The unique blend of entertainment for the Sydney Festival is certain to make it stand out from the pack, writes Steve Dow.

Sydney has had its summer festival of music, theatre, dance and visual arts for 36 years, but the average festival-saturated Australian may not appreciate that what the city has is unique, at least compared with most other Anglo-Celtic countries.

"We don't have this in Europe," insists the festival's Belgium-born artistic director, Lieven Bertels, whose first festival in Sydney is about to begin.

"If you think of the European model of arts festivals, there's a genuine hierarchical competition between high arts up there," he says, raising a palm high, before lowering it to his knees; "and then what we call 'entertainment' down here. I think Australia effectively shifted that model 90 degrees."

No one is denying Europe is saturated in culture, with the high kind embedded in daily life. When he was a kid, for Bertels, who grew up in Hasselt on the Belgian-Dutch border, music education was free and abundant.

His visual arts teacher father and academic mother encouraged him to play piano, but he found the practice tedious.

"I wanted something sexier," he says. So he reached instead for a saxophone, "which is a Belgian invention – very few people seem to know that".

Now, at 42, having long ago realised he was a "terrible saxophonist with mild jazz aspirations and no talent", his studying of musicology at university has left him with an affinity for musicians and presaged a career in radio broadcasting and later curating the Holland Festival for seven years.

Bertels is standing in front of the Sydney Festival stage being erected by a crane in The Domain, the centre of this antipodean collapsing of high and low: "You can have 60,000 people here jumping up and down for a popular music concert, in the same festival as classical music, ballet, contemporary dance and theatre. Really, that's a unique offering, and for me a really exciting challenge."

One of this year's shows Bertels is proudest of is Eraritjaritjaka, from Switzerland's Theatre Vidy-Lausanne.

The show is "life-changing", he says, and its German director and composer, Heiner Goebbels, will be in conversation with Robyn Archer during the festival.

The show, at the Theatre Royal from January 9 to 13, uses music from Amsterdam's Mondriaan String Quartet, performing Bach, Shostakovich etc, while the show's star, famous French actor Andre Wilms, literally leaves the theatre, jumps in a cab and ends up at a Sydney apartment – acting out the play away from the audience, still watching his actions on live video in the theatre.

And that difficult title? It comes from the central Australian Arunta language, and roughly means "full of desire for something that has been lost". The title is the only connection the play has to indigenous Australians. "I wasn't aware of that until people here said: 'We should check protocol and talk to the community'," Bertels admits.

"That was a learning curve for me. I asked Heiner why he chose this title, and he said, 'Because it's such a beautiful word and gets people curious'." The blessing of the Arunta mob at Hermannsburg was duly sought and obtained.

At Sydney Theatre, Neil Armfield makes a welcome return to the stage directing the long-awaited world premiere of Andrew Bovell's adaptation of Kate Grenville's classic The Secret River from January 8 to February 9.

The show will be minus indigenous actor Jack Charles – who resigned in protest in November when the Australia Council of the Arts asked him to prove his "Aboriginality" when applying for a grant – but does keep its indigenous bona fides with Bangarra artistic director Stephen Page as artistic associate and several indigenous actors in the cast.

Over at Parramatta's Riverside Theatre, set to a pulsating Latin soundtrack, an extraordinary piece of cross-over dance-theatre comes in the form of Urban by Britain's circus Circolombia from January 15 to 27, telling stories of gangs, poverty, raw street life and death, with acrobats and dancers who themselves came from such gritty backgrounds in Colombia's Cali before joining the Colombian national circus school Circo Para Todos.

Circolombia was founded by British-born circus artist Felicity Simpson, who tells Summer Herald from Cali that the cast is especially excited about coming to Sydney after sell-out shows in London, Paris and Broadway. "It's a patchwork of their quite varied stories, but they've all come from quite difficult backgrounds," she says. "They're not acting on-stage: it's real, it's personal, and that makes it extremely authentic."

One strong debate in multicultural arts in Australia this year has been the widespread critique of a perceived lack of engagement of Australians, their arts organisations and governments with Asian arts. Lieven Bertels – who himself programmed India's The Manganiyar Seduction at the Holland Festival before it was a hit with Sydney Festival audiences in 2010 – has for 2013 programmed a traditional form of Chinese opera known as kunqu, pronounced "koonchoo".

The Northern Kunqu Opera Theatre will present two shows, The Peony Pavilion and The Jade Hairpin, from January 24 to 26, both starring exquisitely pink-painted singer-actor Wei Chunrong, at the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre.

"Asian performing arts are a difficult beast for a festival director," Bertels says. "It's very easy to say we're going to engage with Asia and embrace it all, for the very simple reason 'Asian' doesn't mean an awful lot. It's a quite artificial idea that all of this sits under one umbrella."

Thus, Bertels says, it's difficult to represent Asian arts in all their shapes and shades. "Kunqu is one of the most refined forms of Chinese opera – one that survived the Cultural Revolution best," he says. "It was originally a courtyard opera performed for wealthy families . . . in today's China, concise versions are presented – in one- to three-day spectacles." Sydney audiences need not worry: these spectacles, without interval, last two hours, but there's no skimping on costumery.

For those who fancy more outlandish frocks, try Semele Walk at Sydney Town Hall from January 11-12 and 14-15, with Vivienne Westwood's frocks sent down the catwalk to Handel's wild and vibrant Semele – the story of a woman's descent into madness – in a show created by Germany's Ludger Engels. Baroque meets fashion. "It's a little bit punk," Bertels promises.

"Even the musicians are dressed in Vivienne Westwood."

Indigenous singer-songwriter Archie Roach will perform his show Into the Bloodstream at the State Theatre on January 25 and January 26 at Parramatta's Parade Ground @ Old King's on the back of his new album of the same name. Never shy about singing from his life, Roach's voice is especially poignant on the song Mulyawongk, which is about his late wife and mother of his children, the singer Ruby Hunter: She come back to the river / And cried so happily / Cos she no longer a stranger / In her own country . . .

It's an especially strong festival this year for music and singer-songwriters in particular: the State Theatre is also the venue on January 17 and 18 for a double bill of Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and indie star St Vincent, aka Annie Clark, who recently collaborated on the album Love This Giant.

On January 13, 18 and 20, Mali singer-songwriter Rokia Traore will present three distinct shows – Dream at the Spiegeltent, Dance at Town Hall, and Sing at City Recital Hall Angel Place. The New York Times waxed of the guitar-playing African troubadour that her "rich and mesmerising voice, regal bearing and fluid movement has enchanted critics".

Bertels says his own flawed attempts at playing music strengthened his admiration for musicians with talent. He's too modest to say music will be his legacy for the Sydney Festival, but undoubtedly he likes being close to musos. "I don't need to share the limelight, but I love the vibe that exists backstage," he says.

One of Bertels's favourite movies is Stanley Kubrick's2001: A Space Odyssey; hence his enthusiasm for a live presentation of the film at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on January 24 and 25 with music supplied by the Sydney Symphony and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs.

Which brings us to a delicate issue: the remains of what used to be festival first night, which in recent years involved a huge celebration of partying, performance and art throughout the city streets. "It's an opening day now, not an opening night," Bertels says. "Festival first night had specific funding attached to it, and the NSW government, when they were facing these austerity measures, had to change that funding."

Bertels says it was a "lovely creative challenge to try to come up with something new . . . we're using three different parts of Sydney, for three different demographics, for three different parts of the day".

On January 5, "three acts" will open the festival on day one: a "fun run" in Hyde Park from 9.30am; the arrival of a large rubber duck at Darling Harbour at 2pm; and a concert in The Domain, headlined by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings from 8pm.